“Hundreds of thousands of women have been systematically raped in the Congolese “war on women”. Lisa F Jackson's essential documentary gives them a voice.”
– Natalie Hanman, The Guardian, March 20th, 2008
Bio of Producer/Director Lisa F. Jackson
Lisa F. Jackson
Producer/Director/Writer
LISA F. JACKSON has been involved in documentary filmmaking for over 30 years. Her work has brought her many awards including five Emmy nominations and two Emmy awards. She most recently completed a feature length documentary that she shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the fate of women and girls in that country’s intractable war. The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo won a Special Jury Prize for Documentaries at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and 2 Emmy nominations and was broadcast on HBO. She produced and directed Meeting with a Killer: One Family’s Journey (2001 Emmy Award nominee) for Court TV; Life Afterlife, a 90-minute Special for HBO; The Secret Life of Barbie (1999 Emmy Award winner) for ABC News; Addicted and Why Am I Gay? for HBO’s America Undercover series; No Money, Mo’ Problems and Smart Sex for the MTV series “True Life”; The Other Epidemic for ABC News; Firefighters for The Learning Channel; A Passion to Play for ABC Sports; Anatomy of a Baseball Trade for HBO Sports; five episodes in the Hallmark Channel’s acclaimed Adoption series, including stories shot in Siberia and Guatemala; two seasons of Psychic Detectives for Court TV and national PSA’s for the Office for Victims of Crime. For the last two years Jackson has been shooting a documentary about a group of displaced women living in the slums of Bogotá, Colombia.
Jackson studied filmmaking at MIT with Richard Leacock and has directed and/or edited dozens of films for PBS including: Voices and Visions: Emily Dickinson, Jackson Pollock: Portrait, Through Madness (1993 NYC Emmy winner), The Creative Spirit, Storytellers, The Van Cliburn Piano Competition; Bill Moyers’ Journal, the prize-winning series The Mind, and segments for Sesame Street and Live from Lincoln Center.
Tom Shales of the Washington Post has praised her documentaries as “superb” and “outstanding,” John O’Connor commented in the New York Times that “producer/director Lisa F. Jackson is remarkably adept in getting her subjects to speak frankly and thoughtfully,” and the Christian Science Monitor noted that she takes on difficult subjects “with intelligence and courage.”
Jackson’s other awards include an Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Special (’99); a New York City Emmy (’93); three CINE Golden Eagles; Best Documentary Awards from the Rome Independent Film Festival and International Black DocuFest; Audience Choice Awards from the London HRWFF, One World Slovakia, Vancouver, Breckenridge and Cinequest film festivals; a Gracie Award from AWRT; four Houston International Film Festival Gold Awards; a Silver Chris Award from the Columbus International Film Festival; a Planned Parenthood “Maggie” Award for Outstanding Documentary; two Gold Clarion Awards from Women in Communications; the 2009 iWitness Award from Jewish World Watch and a Movies That Matter Award from Amnesty International. She has screened her work and lectured at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Brandeis, Purdue, NYU, Yale, Notre Dame and Harvard University and was a visiting professor of documentary film at the School for Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Filmmaker’s Statement
My objectives in making this film are political and personal. I am propelled by the urgency to expose an unimaginable, growing humanitarian crisis, and I have my own personal quest to understand the universal stigmas that attach to rape and its survivors.
I myself am the victim of a gang rape and have always felt a powerful connection to women and girls who have suffered the same plight. I’ve often found in conversations with survivors of sexual violence that our numerous differences are often trumped by our shared trauma, and that that commonality can build un-common bridges. And this is what I discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In May and June of 2006 I traveled to the DRC, embarking on a voyage into a literal heart of darkness to find women who would bear witness to their own experiences and break the silence that envelops the subject of rape both in their country and around the world. I returned for a follow-up in November, and filmed chilling interviews with self-confessed, and unabashed, rapists.
I ask: Why has the systematic rape and sexual enslavement of tens of thousands of women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo escaped the world’s attention? Is it compassion fatigue? Racism? Is the political situation in Congo too impenetrable? Is there something about sexual violence that makes us all turn away? And, most importantly, where are the voices of the women themselves? Where are their stories?
I met with rape survivors in numbers that were overwhelming and found that our shared experience of victim-hood was a means to connect. I am white, healthy, in charge of my own life, living relatively free from ostracism and fear: living a favored life. They had not been so favored. And yet, we have all survived.
Several dozen women and girls spoke to me with surprising openness about their experiences, their nightmares and dreams. Their stories need to be told and, more importantly, they need to be the ones doing the telling, which is another important goal of the film: to explore, witness and contribute to these women’s healing through the empowerment of personal narrative.
By bringing these women out of the shadows, the film will be a catalyst in focusing world attention on their plight, bringing opprobrium upon those in power who turn their backs, and sparking conversations and policy change concerning the fate of women and girls in a world consumed by armed conflict.
Lisa F. Jackson
March 2007
